Bits & Bytes - Time to Rip Out Your Phone Edition! - July 17, 2012

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Cell phone companies see spike in surveillance requests

By Jasmin Melvin

Reuters 
Business
July 10, 2012
http://in.mobile.reuters.com/article/idINBRE8680TW20120709

Mobile phone carriers received more than 1.3 million requests
in 2011 from U.S. law enforcement agencies for customers'
phone records, and the requests are on the rise. Neither law
enforcement nor companies are required to report such
requests, making the release of this information the first
public accounting of law enforcement's use of cell phone
surveillance. Cell phone tracking has become a common practice
for police with little or no oversight.

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That's No Phone. That's My Tracker

By Peter Maass and Megha Rajagopalan

New York Times
Sunday Review
July 13, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/sunday-review/thats-not-my-phone-its-my-tracker.html

Thanks to the explosion of GPS technology and smartphone apps,
our cellphones know where and what we buy, how much money we
have in the bank, whom we text and e-mail, what time we go to
sleep and wake up, etc.   GPS data can reveal whether a person
"is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the
gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical
treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political
groups."   And new research suggests that by cross-referencing
your geographical data with that of your friends, it's
possible to predict your future whereabouts with a much higher
degree of accuracy.

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Tech Companies Leave Phone Calls Behind

by Amy O'Leary

New York Times
Business Day Technology
July 6, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/07/technology/tech-companies-leave-phone-calls-behind.html

Making actual voice calls have been falling out of fashion
with teenagers and people in their 20s for some time (text
only, please). But foregoing phone access is becoming a matter
of policy for tech companies. Increasingly, companies like
Facebook, Twitter, LinkIn and Google no longer provide
customer service on the telephone, or even list phone numbers.
The companies argue that with millions of users every day,
they cannot possibly pick up a phone.  Instead they have paved
the way for large-scale customer service by keeping everything
online. 

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Judge Orders Twitter to Release Protester's Messages

By Russ Buettner 

New York Times Blogs
City Room
July 2, 2012
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/02/judge-orders-twitter-to-release-protesters-messages/

Thoughts may be ephemeral, but a tweet, apparently, is
forever.  A Criminal Court judge in Manhattan ruled that
Twitter must turn over to prosecutors messages sent by a
Brooklyn writer during the Occupy Wall Street protests last
fall. In doing so, the judge indicated that although private
speech was protected, the same did not apply to public
comments on Twitter.

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The Newsweek Digital 100 Power Index

By Nick Summers

The Daily Beast
June 25, 2012 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/digital-power-index.html

they've made billions and toppled regimes. .Now they want to
rewire your world. Among the most powerful digital disruptors,
#3 in the category of BUILDERS is --Bram Cohen - CHIEF
SCIENTIST AND COFOUNDER, BITTORRENT INC. His name is
practically blacklisted in Hollywood, but it's widely revered
online. Bram Cohen is the cofounder of the BitTorrent peer-to-
peer (P2P) file-sharing system used by millions to transfer
large files over the Internet (or as the music and movie
industries would put it, steal). First released in 2001,
BitTorrent was the largest single source of all Internet
traffic for many years, until it was surpassed by Netflix in
May 2011. Cohen's day-to-day, now, is to keep the service
available and accessible for millions of users.

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Cisco locks customers out of their own routers, only lets them
back in if they agree to being spied upon and monetized

By Cory Doctorow

Boingboing
July 3, 2012

http://boingboing.net/2012/07/03/cisco-locks-customers-out-of-t.html

Owners of Cisco/Linksys home routers got a nasty shock this
week, when their devices automatically downloaded a new
operating system, which locked out device owners. After the
update, the only way to reconfigure your router was to create
an account on Cisco's "cloud" service, signing up to a service
agreement that gives Cisco the right to spy on your Internet
use and sell its findings, and also gives them the right to
disconnect you (and lock you out of your router) whenever they
feel like it.   Oh, and Cisco reserves the right to continue
to update your router, even if you set it not to allow
automatic updates.

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Groups release dueling Internet freedom declarations

By Grant Gross 

Computerworld
July 2, 2012

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=DDC69F48-B69A-6B68-0B1A1FAE9842C544

Two groups with members with opposing positions have released
competing declarations on Internet Freedom. One, backed by
Free Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other
groups calls for an end to internet censorship, universal
broadband access and net neutrality principles for an Internet
"where everyone is free to connect and communicate."

The second, from free-market think-tanks TechFreedom, the
Competitive Enterprise Institute and others, calls on
governments to avoid getting involved with the broadband
marketplace.  "Government is the greatest obstacle to the
emergence of fast and affordable broadband networks."

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Mobile Technology Frees Workers to Work Any 20 Hours a Day
They Choose

By Ina Fried 

Wall Street Journal
All Things D
July 2, 2012

http://allthingsd.com/20120702/mobile-technology-frees-workers-to-work-any-20-hours-a-day-they-choose/

Mobile technology is allowing workers to work wherever and
whenever they choose, which means less time in the office, but
also more time working.  A new survey from Good Technology
finds that the typical American is working more than a month
and a half of overtime per year, just in the amount of time
spent answering work phone calls and responding to email.

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Your E-Book Is Reading You

By Alexandra Alter

Wall Street Journal
Arts & Entertainment
June 29, 2012 

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702304870304577490950051438304-lMyQjAxMTAyMDIwOTEyNDkyWj.html

In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what
happens when a reader sits down with a book. With e-books,
digital-book publishers and retailers now know more about
their readers than ever before.  The rise of digital books has
prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the
activity into something measurable and quasi-public.

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Rush Limbaugh's Phony Empire Exposed

By Richard Meyers

Daily Kos
July 11, 2012

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/11/1108524/-Rush-Limbaugh-s-phony-empire-exposed

If you've ever listened to a right-wing talk show when a
caller teed up a perfect swing for the host, it may have all
been fake. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Glenn
Beck are all syndicated by a company called Premiere Networks,
which has a secretive voice talent service called Premiere On
Call, with "actors hired to read scripts and pretend to be
real people" when they call in.  And recently it was
discovered that "Rush Babes For America" Facebook page was
buying "like" hits from New Dehli. Which all proves that the
Rush empire is an empty and fraudulent shell.

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Journatic worker takes `This American Life' inside outsourced
journalism

by Anna Tarkov

Poynter.
July 2, 2012 

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/179555/journatic-staffer-takes-this-american-life-inside-outsourced-journalism/

Not long after he started working for Journatic, Ryan Smith
felt there was something not quite right about what the
company was doing. Journatic provides outsourced journalism
work for newspapers, and he noticed information was often
pulled from LinkedIn, writing was outsourced to foreign
countries like the Philippines, and bylines were sometimes
fake.
[The complete article is a long exposé.]

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Something fishy?

By Mariah Blake 

Columbia Journalism Review
July / August 2012

http://www.cjr.org/feature/something_fishy.php

When John Solomon was executive editor of the reactionary
daily newspaper Washington Times, he had grand plans for the
digital future of the paper until a feud in the family of
owner Rev. Sun Myung Moon turned off the spigot.  Somehow, he
found his way to the investigative website Center for Public
Integrity, where he tried to transfer the same vision.
Instead, he nearly brought it crashing down.
[Another long exposé.]

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